Next let us group together the miracles in the history of St. Mark. One of the qualities which strikes us most in the “Miracle of the Slave” is its strong local colour. It tells of Titian and Bonifazio and is unlike Tintoretto’s later style. The colours are glowing and gem-like; carnations, orange-yellows, deep scarlet, and turquoise-blue. The crimson velvet of the judge’s dress is finely relieved against a blue-green sky, and Tintoretto has kept that instinctive fire and dash which culminates at once and without effort in perfect action, “as a bird flies, or a horse gallops.” It startled the quiet members of the Guild, and at the first moment they hesitated to accept it. The “Rescue of the Saracen” and the “Transportation of the Body” are more in the golden-brown manner to which he was moving, but it is in the “Finding of the Body” (Brera) that he rises to the highest emotional pitch. The colossal form of the saint, expanding with life and power as he towers in the spirit above his own lifeless clay, draws all eyes to him and seems to fill the barrel-roofed hall with ease and energy. Every part of the vault is flooded by his life-giving energy, and here Tintoretto deals with light and shade with full mastery.
As we follow Tintoretto’s career, it is borne in upon us how little positive colour it takes to make a great colourist. The whole Venetian School, indeed, does not deal with what we understand as bright colour. Vivid tints are much more characteristic of the Flemish and the Florentine, or, let us say, of the painters of to-day. Strong, crude colours are to be seen on all sides in the Salon or the Royal Academy, but they are absent from the scheme of sombre splendour which has given the Venetians their title to fame. This is especially true of Tintoretto, and it becomes more so as he advances. His gamut becomes more golden-brown and mellow; the greys and browns and ivories combine in a lustrous symphony more impressive than gay tints, flooded with enveloping shadow and illumined by flashes of iridescent light. Another noticeable feature is the way in which he puts on his oil-colour, so that it bears the direct impression of the painter’s hand. The Florentines had used flat tints, opaque and with every brush-mark smoothed away; but as the later Venetians covered large spaces with oil-colour, they no longer sought to dissimulate the traces of the brush, and light, distance, movement, were all conveyed by the turns and twists and swirls with which the thin oil-colour was laid on. Look at the power of touch in such a picture as the “Death of Abel”; we see this spontaneity of execution actually forming part of the emotion with which the picture is charged. The concentrated hate of the one figure, the desperate appeal of the other, the lurid note of the landscape, gain their emotion as much from the impetuous brush-work as from the more studied design. We come closest to the painter’s mind in the Scuola di San Rocco. He had already been employed in the church, and there remains, darkened and ruined by damp, the series illustrative of the career of S. Roch, patron saint of sufferers from the plague. When the great Halls of Assembly were to be decorated in 1560, the confraternity asked a conclave of painters, among whom were Veronese and Andrea Schiavone, to prepare sketches for competition. When they assembled to display their designs, Tintoretto swept aside a cartoon from the ceiling of the refectory and discovered a finished picture, the “S. Roch in Glory,” which still holds its place there. Neither the other artists nor the brethren seem to have approved of this unconventional proceeding, but he “hoped they would not be offended; it was the only way he knew.” Partly from the displeased withdrawal of some of the rest, but partly also from the excellence of the work, the commission fell to Tintoretto, and after two years’ work he was received into the order, and was assigned an annual provision of 100 ducats (£50) a year for life, being bound every year to furnish three pictures.
CHAPTER XXVI
TINTORETTO (continued)
The first portion of the vast building that was finished was the Refectory, but in examining the scheme, it is perhaps more convenient to leave it to its proper place, which is the climax. Before beginning, Tintoretto must have had the whole thing planned, and we cannot doubt that he was influenced by the Sixtine Chapel and recalled its plan and significance; the old dispensation typifying the new, the Old Testament history vivified by the acts of Christ. The main feature of the harmony which it is only reasonable to suppose governs the whole building, is its dedication to S. Roch, the special patron of mercy. The principal paintings of the Upper Hall are therefore concerned with acts of divine mercy and deliverance, and even the monochromes bear upon the central idea. On the roof are the three most important miracles of mercy performed on behalf of the Chosen People. The paintings on roof and walls are linked together. The “Fall of Man” at one end of the Hall, the disobedient eating, corresponds with the obedient eating of the Passover at the other, and is interdependent with the Manna in the Wilderness, the Last Supper, and the Miracle of the Loaves. The Miracles of satisfied thirst are represented by “Moses striking the Rock,” Samson drinking from the jawbone and the waters of Meribah. The Baptism and other signs of the Advent of Christ and the Divine preparation, balance events in the early life of Moses. In the Refectory which opens from the Great Hall, we come to the “Crucifixion,” the crowning act of mercy, surrounded by the events which immediately succeeded it, and typified immediately above in the Central Hall, by the lifting up of the Brazen Serpent. The miracles include six of refreshment and succour, two of miraculous restoration to health, and two of deliverance from danger. The whole scheme has been worked out in detail in my book on “Tintoretto.”
In the working out of his great scheme, Tintoretto is impatient of hackneyed and traditional forms; he must have a reading of his own, and one which appeals to his imagination. We see that passion for movement which distinguishes his early work. “Moses striking the Rock” is a figure instinct with purpose and energy. The water bounds forth, living, life-giving, the people strain wildly to reach it. His figures are sometimes found fault with, as extravagant in gesture, but the attitudes were intended to be seen and to arrest attention from far below, and we must not forget that the painter’s models were drawn from a Southern race, to whom emphasis of action is natural. Tintoretto, it may be conceded, is on certain occasions, generally when dealing with accessory figures, inclined to excess of gesture; it is the defect of his temperament, but when he has a subject that carries him away he is sincere and never violent in spirit. Titian is cold compared to him; his colour, however effective, is calculated, whereas Tintoretto’s seems to permeate every object and to soak the whole composition. To quote a recent critic: “He chose to begin, if possible, with a subject charged with emotion. He then proceeded to treat it according to its nature, that is to say, he toned down and obscured the outlines of form and mapped out the subject instead in pale or sombre masses of light and shade. Under the control of this powerful scheme of chiaroscuro, the colouring of the composition was placed, but its own character, its degree of richness and sobriety, was determined by the kind of emotion belonging to the subject. To use colour in this way, not only with emotional force, but with emotional truth, is to use it to perform one of the greatest functions of art.”[5]
So in the Crucifixion it is not so much the aspect of the groups, the pathos of the faces or gestures, that tells, but it is the mystery and gloom in which the whole scene is muffled, the atmosphere into which we are absorbed, the sense of livid terror conveyed by the brooding light and shadow, that makes us feel how different the rendering is from any other. In the “Christ before Pilate” the head and figure of Christ are not particularly impressive in themselves, but the brilliant light falling on the white robes and coursing down the steps supplies dignity and poetry; the slender white figure stands out like a shaft of light against the lurid and troubled background. Again, in the “Way to Golgotha” the falling evening gleam, the wild sky, the deep shadow of the ravine, throw into relief the quiet form, detached in look and feeling, as of one upborne by the spirit far above the brutal throng. Nowhere does that spiritual emotion find deeper expression than in the “Visitation.” The passion of thanksgiving, the poignancy of mother-love, throb through the two women, who have been travelling towards one another, with a great secret between them, and who at length reach the haven of each other’s love and knowledge. Here, too, the dying light, the waving tree, the obliteration of form, and the feeling of mystery make a deep appeal to the sensuous apprehension. We find it again and again; the great trees sway and whisper in the gathering darkness as the Virgin rides through the falling evening shadows, clasping her Babe, and in that most moving of all Tintoretto’s creations, the “S. Mary of Egypt,” the emotional mood of Nature’s self is brought home to us. The trees that dominate the landscape are painted with a few “strokes like sabre cuts”; the landscape, given with apparent carelessness, yet conveying an indescribable sense of space and solemnity, unfolds itself under the dying day; and in solitary meditation, thrilling with ecstasy, sits that little figure, whose heart has travelled far away to commune with the Spirit, “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.”
It is not possible in a short space to touch, even in passing, on all the many scenes in these halls: the “Annunciation,” with its marvellous flight of cherubs, reminding us of the flight of pigeons in the Piazza, and how often the old painter must have watched them; the “Temptation,” contrasting the throbbing evil, the flesh that must be fed, with the calm of absolute purity; the “Massacre of the Innocents,” for which the horrors of sacked towns could have supplied many a parallel,—we have not time to dwell on these, but we may notice how the artist has overcome the difficulty of seeing clearly in the dark halls, by choosing strong and varied effects of light for the most shadowed spaces, and we can picture what the halls must have been like when they first glowed from his hand, adorned with gilded fretwork and moulding, and hung with opulent draperies, with the rose-red and purple of bishops’ and cardinals’ robes reflected in the gleaming pavement.